‘The Little Mermaid’ Splashes To $164M Global Bow, But There’s Something Fishy Overseas As Disney Pic Beset By Review-Bombing
28.05.2023 - 16:49
/ deadline.com
Refresh for latest…: Disney’s live-action take on The Little Mermaid is doing swimmingly at the domestic box office, with a three-day opening of $95.5M and a four-day projection of $117.5M. Factoring in the international box office bow of $68.3M, that makes for an estimated $163.8M global debut through Sunday. The offshore launch is lower than hoped for coming into the frame. But it bears noting there was something fishy going on in overseas markets with so-called review-bombing in such areas as France, Korea, Germany and beyond.
While the Rob Marshall-directed update has a 95% verified audience score on Rotten Tomatoes, film ratings websites overseas, including IMDB in the UK, Brazil and Mexico as well as AlloCiné in France, posted advisories during the rollout when negative user reviews appeared in questionable abundance.
As we noted in our global preview, The Little Mermaid was expected to be more of a domestic play at the outset. However, it’s fairly astonishing to see these overseas reactions — largely believed to be led by internet trolls.
In France, where Little Mermaid launched on Wednesday, AlloCiné wrote, “We are currently observing an unusual distribution of scores which demands the need for caution. We encourage you to make up your own mind about the film.” While not unprecedented, this is a rare move. To be fair, critics at some respected outlets including Libération, Première and Les Inrockuptibles did not like the movie, giving it just one star.
On IMDB, a warning reads: “Our rating mechanism has detected unusual voting activity on this title. To preserve the reliability of our rating system, an alternate weighting calculation has been applied.” That note appears on the U.S. and Canadian sites as well